Drillpipe Conveyed Casing and Cement Evaluation Allows for Acquisition of Critical Measurements in Parallel with Existing Well Operations

Abstract

Abstract The oil and gas industry is in a state of continually challenging the way to improve the efficiency and safety of well construction activities. An interesting path has been followed in the last 30 years in the development and use of logging while drilling tools. The measurement quality and reliability of these tools for open hole formation evaluation and geosteering has propelled an entire sequence of highly complex and highly deviated wells with enormous improvements in productivity from existing fields. You would be hard pressed to find any wells, particularly in the offshore domain, that do not utilize logging while drilling measurements that were once the province of wireline tools only. This development of technologies and tools has, as stated above, largely focused on open hole and while drilling applications only. The same cannot be said for cased hole evaluation tools in general, and for well integrity tools that measure the condition and properties of the casing and cement. This paper will demonstrate the development of a new drillpipe conveyed tool that can both measure the casing condition and what is in the annular space behind the casing. We will show examples from around the world of the tools and the large variety of applications and conditions it has been deployed. Being able to run anytime drillpipe is deployed in the well therefore increases the amount of opportunity to get these critical measurements and also to be run in parallel with existing operations throughout the well construction period. As can be imagined this can lead to considerable efficiency gains as the logging does not require a dedicated run. The basic premise of the tool is that a drill collar is fitted with three circumferential pulse echo ultrasonic transducers. This allows for a full azimuthal image of the casing and annular space behind the casing if the tool is rotated, either from a downhole device such as a mud motor, or by surface rotation through the rig rotary table or top drive. The tool can be run in real-time and also in memory mode, in either case data is both processed downhole and the raw waveforms can be recovered from the tool when back on surface. Analysis of the acquired data allows for interpretation of internal caliper, the thickness of the casing, the location of casing collars and an evaluation of the material in the annular space behind the first casing string. The need to provide oriented images means the tool has magnetometers, accelerometers and a basic gyro measurement device that can be used for orientation of downhole devices such as whipstocks or oriented perforations.